I CALL it Manassas.
That is the name we Southerners gave it. We won that battle more completely and more conspicuously than any other battle was won by either side during the Civil War.
It is the right of the victor always to name the action. We named it Manassas. In the North it is called Bull Run.
We reached Manassas after two days and nights of ceaseless marching, at ten o’clock on the evening of the 20th of July, 1861.
We knew that trouble was at hand; otherwise Stuart would not have swung us at such a breakneck speed across the mountains from the valley to this point. We were six hundred strong.
Six hundred young Virginians, cradled in the saddle, and who had shot wild turkeys as soon as we were able to digest them. There was another battalion of cavalry present, under Colonel Radford, numbering perhaps three hundred men. But the story had gone forth in the Northern army that we were thirty thousand of the finest horsemen ever known since the days of the Mamelukes.
That story had its part in creating the panic at Manassas.
I believe we were good horsemen. There were men among us who might have given the Mamelukes points, both in horsemanship and in the use of the sabre. But if our nine hundred men had been the thirty thousand reported, we should have thundered into Washington on the night of Sunday, July 21, 1861, and would have ended the war then and there, in spite of the presidential stupidity which feared that “aggression” might anger a people with whom we were at war.
We lay that night in an open field, each man having his horse tethered to his left arm, and each man booted, spurred, sabred, and pistolled for instant action.
The bugle sounded no reveille that morning. A shell from the enemy’s camp, which fell in the midst of the regiment, saved the bugler the trouble.
With a laugh, which was almost a chuckle, Stuart called out: “That’s ‘boots and saddles,’ boys,” and in an instant we were on our horses.
The first great battle of the war had begun.
It was not until noon, or nearly that, that the cavalry had any real work to do. I didn’t look at my watch, but it must have been about noon when Stuart swept us at a tremendous pace through a regiment or two of Zouaves, and back again over the same ground. I saw no Zouaves for the reason that there was too much dust to see anything; but it was understood when the charge was over, that we had driven them back. And half a dozen empty saddles in our own ranks attested the fact that they had not been driven back without a stubborn and manly resistance.
A little later, we cavalrymen were ordered up to the support of some batteries that had temporarily run out of ammunition. Our reputation as Mamelukes sufficed at that point to prevent a charge, so that our real work in the battle did not begin until the panic in McDowell’s army set in.
Then Stuart rose in his stirrups and shouted at the top of his voice: “They’re licked, boys! They’re licked! They’re licked!”
Then hastily he rattled off orders. The substance of them was that we were to divide the cavalry into squads of ten and twenty men each, and proceed at once in pursuit.
“If there aren’t officers, and non-commissioned officers enough, let anybody command a squad. This is business.”
As the several squads started at a gallop after the enemy, Stuart called out to each: “Attack any force you find. There is no cohesion left among ’em.”
In that command he struck the key-note of the whole situation. Seasoned soldier that he was, he knew that without cohesion, soldiers are helpless, and numbers count for nothing.
We plunged forward across every ford and along every road that led from Bull Run towards Centreville. At every point we found “chaos come again.”
A squad of ten men, armed only with sabres and pistols, but backed by the Mameluke tradition, would call out to eighty or a hundred fully armed infantry: “Throw down your arms, or we’ll put you to the sword! Throw down your arms, or we’ll put you to the sword!”
The panic-stricken men would obey the order instantly, disregarding the fact that with a single volley they might have swept the insolent squad instantly out of existence.
It was not merely that the army was panic stricken. It was encumbered at every step by a multitude of embarrassing picnickers,—a multitude of men and women who had come out from Washington to see us exterminated and to join in a triumphal march to Richmond. These people had brought out with them more superfluous provisions than our army had eaten for a fortnight. They abandoned their luxuries in the middle of the road and ran. They left champagne enough unopened for a regiment to swim in. They fled precipitately, adding at every step by their own insensate fear to the panic that had already overtaken the troops.
Men cut horses out of vehicles that held helpless women, and madly mounting them abandoned their charges and their duties, in order to escape a present and impending danger to themselves. Fortunately for their charges, the Southerners were not making war on women.
Every woman was instantly assured of her own personal safety. Every horse that was left behind was hitched at once to a vehicle, and the vehicle loaded with women was started under an assurance of safe conduct towards Washington. When the supply of abandoned horses fell short, it was made good by animals from our batteries, and now and then by the riderless horse of one of the Mamelukes who had received a mortal wound.
Along the roads we found many dead men, for whose deaths no coroner would have been able to account—men utterly destitute of wounds, who had died clearly either of fright, or of exhaustion, or of both.
At Cub Run, an ambulance or a caisson broke down on the bridge and obstructed it. The obstruction almost instantly caused a congestion of two or three thousand panic-stricken soldiers and picnickers on the hither side of the stream.
Then came Kemper with his guns. He was as black as a negro with powder smoke. His cannoneers were equally begrimed. From the top of a hill, not more than two hundred yards distant,—pistol-shot range,—he opened fire with canister. The effect upon the crowd was instantaneous and almost startling. Its constituent members dispersed as a covey of partridges does when a shot-gun is fired into its lurking place. Some of them ran up the creek. Some of them ran down the creek. Some of them plunged into the creek, and crossed or drowned, as the case may be.
It was just then that Stuart rode up and cried out: “We’ll go into Washington to-night, boys. And my headquarters will be at Willard’s Hotel.”
It was just then also that couriers came, bearing the paralyzing presidential order to stop the pursuit at Cub Run.
It was just then that the despondency of the Mamelukes began.
A little later it rained.